Rangel calls lack of Obama staff diversity ’embarrassing’

Rep. Charlie Rangel, a Democrat from New York, is sharply criticizing President Obama on his recent Cabinet picks.

“It’s as embarrassing as hell,” Rangel said on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co. “We’ve been through all of this with Mitt Romney. And we were very hard on Mitt Romney with his women binder and a variety of things.”

He added, “I kinda think there’s no excuse when it’s the second term. If it’s the first term, you can say people have to know who is around and qualified in order to get this job, number one … I had thought that it could be the Harvard problem where people just know each other, trust each other and “women and minorities don’t get a chance to rub elbows and their reputations and experience is not known.”

Rangel has strongly backed Obama’s agenda in Congress, but had tensions with the administration after the president called for him to step down in 2010 amid a series of ethics allegations.